On the 17th of June 2017, the three of us flew from Jakarta to London (with an hour layover in Singapore). It was my first long-haul flight and let me just say that having to sit for fourteen hours on a designated spot in a steel bird is indeed a grueling experience. Thankfully I wouldn’t categorize it my worst flight yet. I decided to log my activities for that period in the air, taking off from Jakarta at around 7 am and landing at 8 pm London time. Here’s what happened:

4h 12min: Got less than an hour of sleep in between my time logs. Wrote a little passage inspired by plane rides, here’s an excerpt.

The plane is a hub of stories from all over the world, brought together by one destination and one hundred different reasons. It is a place of discovery, where friendship starts, or where strangers may leave as strangers still, just fourteen hours of silent acknowledgement between them.

6h 17min: I was somewhere over Dubai, hoping dinner would soon be served.

8h 39min: Around 36 000 feet above Ankara. This is an unpopular opinion, but I think airplane food tastes so much better than it actually is because meals are the second thing I look forward to in flights, after landing. The three seats in front of ours were empty, so I managed to get a short lie-down there. It felt so much like luxury.

11h 7min: 10,173 km traveled so far. I couldn’t sleep, but knew that my body craved for it. So I forced myself to shut my eyes and still my muscles for the duration of Jamie Lawson’s album. I’d lost track of time the entire flight before this, but then I did some calculation to find that it was 11 pm in Jakarta and I’ve had only two meals all day. No wonder I was starving.

12h 25min: Started “The Space Between Us”. I remember being pissed off for not starting the movie (which was interesting, apparently) earlier.

And that was that! We arrived in London not long after, bone tired and ready to rest our weary selves on legit beds in our hotel room. One other thing I noticed that was definitely weird (at least for me, it is): the sky was bright from the moment we took off, during the entirety of our flight, and until we landed.